In compact electronic appliances, cellular phones, personal computers and the like, a hinge mechanism is traditionally used to pivotally couple the main body of an appliance to a lid member, and the electronic circuit of the main body is electrically connected to the electric circuit of the lid member via a flexible ribbon wire inserted into a cylinder element in the hinge mechanism.
However, wiring by means of such a ribbon wire provides no physical support between interconnected members, thereby causing inconvenience to the user. For instance, it is very difficult to insert a ribbon wire into a hole having a very small diameter in a cylindrical element at the time of wiring, and further, the wire is occasionally caught by members other than the cylindrical element, thereby causing in the wiring process. Thus the efficiency of assembling an applicance in an automatic assembly line is greatly reduced.
In view thereof, connectors which do no utilize any ribbon wire have been proposed. For instance, the Examined Japanese Utility Model Registration under Publication No. H06-7594 discloses a hinge connector which comprises a receptacle contact element having a U-shaped receptacle and a tab contact element having a substantially circular tab, which is pivotally engaged with and slides in contact with the inner side of the said receptacle, and the outer peripheral side comes into point-contact with a projected edge of the receptacle in the engaged state.
Moreover, the Unexamined Japanese Patent Application under Publication No. H07-6842 discloses a connector, wherein one end of a first contact element, slides elastically in contact with a ring element mounted onto the main shaft of the hinge mechanism and the other end of which is fixed to a first connection terminal of a first circuit board and wherein one end of a second contact element, slides elastically in contact with the ring element, the other end of which is fixed to a second connection terminal of a second circuit board. Further, in Unexamined Japanese Patent Application under Publication No. H05-258823, an oscillating electrical interconnecting machine is disclosed, in which an electrical contact is formed at the end of a coupling device.
Furthermore, Unexamined Japanese Patent Application under Publication No. 2000-268925 discloses a press-contact connector in which contacts are concentrically arranged on a circuit board to simplify the work of assembly.
However, it has been noted that the above-mentioned connectors have been modified and improved so as to fit the corresponding hinge mechanism in the electronic appliances in which they are employed, and were not used in the buried state of the hinge mechanism itself. Actually, in the hinge connector disclosed in the abovementioned Examined Japanese Utility Model Registration under Publication No. H06-7594, the receptacle contact element and tab contact element are mounted respectively onto corresponding dielectric housings and these housings are coupled with each other via a rotatable concavo-convex structure. As a result, the connector housing cannot be mounted on an element constituting the hinge mechanism, for example, a cylindrical element, making it impossible to miniaturize the connector. Moreover, the connector disclosed in the abovementioned Unexamined Japanese Patent Application under Publication No. H07-6842 has a very complicated structure, which is formed by mounting ring elements in the main shaft to the hinge mechanism, thereby making it impossible to mount the hinge mechanism upon the cylindrical element.
Moreover, the electrical interconnecting machine disclosed in the Unexamined Japanese Patent Application under Publication No. H05-258823 is used on copy machines, and has no similar structure which permits mounting the hinge mechanism upon a cylindrical element. Furthermore, the connector disclosed in the Unexamined Japanese Patent Application under Publication No. 2000-268925 is of the press-contact type, and when such type is used in the above-mentioned hinge mechanism, the repetitive application of the rotary movement causes the reduction of contact reliability and deterioration of the rotary moving property due to the torsion applied to a contact in the rotary movement of the circuit board.